The prospect of writing a bad review of "Happy Feet Two" is about as appetizing as kicking a puppy. But what if it's a puppy that eats all the furniture – or at least the better part of two hours? And what if it's a puppy that's not a puppy at all, or even a penguin, but a vast money-making machine that's stretched out and plodding and features bad performances of good songs, good performances of bad songs, and dances by creatures that cannot dance, because they can barely move their feet, because they're penguins.

Let's just talk here: If you want to hear Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation," you have the option of listening to Janet Jackson. Or you can go see "Happy Feet Two" to see computer generated penguins doing tiny synchronized dance movements and to hear Pink (as Gloria, the Mama Penguin) screwing up the vocal.

Likewise, if you want to hear the tenor's big aria from the third act of "Tosca," you can choose from Pavarotti or Giuseppe Di Stefano.

Or, in "Happy Feet Two," you can hear a computer-generated baby penguin, with the voice of a boy soprano, singing the aria with new lyrics: "You don't need to fly to be awesome!"

One scene in "Happy Feet Two" has some genuine suspense – it involves an elephant seal who gets trapped underwater and needs to be rescued.

There are also a couple of scenes involving a pair of krill (voiced by Brad Pitt and Matt Damon) that hold interest because the underwater visuals are so lush and colorful.

But the rest of the movie offers only the idea of suspense, the idea of crisis, the idea of emotion, the idea of connection, the idea of humor – which is the same as saying it offers the counterfeit of those things.

Yet just because it's a children's film hardly means that a gesture should be accepted as the real thing.

Anyway, this whole global warming situation? It's getting bad. While Mumble (Elijah Wood), his son (Ava Acres) and a few other young emperor penguins are away from the community, the ice breaks, avalanches occur and the entire penguin nation finds itself trapped in a snow valley surrounded by mountains.

The rest of the movie involves the efforts of every penguin outside the vast ditch to rescue the penguins stuck inside. Pink (that is, Gloria) is one of the marooned penguins, but that doesn't stop her from singing another song. So no luck there.

The movie's bereftness of invention can be measured by how no story element builds on another.

Instead, "Happy Feet Two" is plotted so that a bunch of disparate things happen, until it's time to end the movie. Along the way, there are uninvolving distractions, such as the passion of a penguin named Ramon for an indifferent penguin.

Just offhand, do you get a chill when I mention that the voice of Ramon is Robin Williams?

HAPPY FEET TWO

1 star

VOICE CAST: Elijah Wood, Pink and Robin Williams

DIRECTOR: George Miller

100 minutes

Rated PG (some rude humor and mild peril)

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